antibiotic resistance
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More And More Infections In Europe Can Evade The Most Powerful Antibiotics
More and more infections in Europe are proving able to evade even the most powerful, last-resort antibiotics, posing an alarming threat to patient safety in the region, health officials said on Monday...
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More Hospitals Are Ditching Antibiotics In The Meat They Serve
Concern about the livestock industry's overuse of antibiotics has led a number of health care institutions to start choosing meat from animals raised without antibiotics whenever they can. According to Practice Greenhealth, a nonprofit that's helping the health care industry on this issue, more than 400 U.S. hospitals are working toward a goal of making 20 percent of their meat purchases "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to "antibiotic-free." And around a dozen hospitals have already switched the majority of their chicken purchases to antibiotic-free.
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New Arms Race: Science Versus Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs
The death rate from bacterial infections plummeted following the discovery of penicillin. However, these microbes developed ways to resist our antibiotics. What threats do superbugs pose and what factors contribute to their emergence? The discovery and development of antibiotics saved millions of lives during the latter half of the 20th century. Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, who witnessed soldiers with infected wounds perish while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War, per chance discovered a penicillin producing mold in 1928...
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New Device Detects Bacteria and Tests for Antibiotic Resistance
An interdisciplinary team of engineering and pharmaceutical researchers at the University of Alberta has invented a device that can rapidly identify harmful bacteria and can determine whether it is resistant to antibiotics. The device could save precious hours in patient care and public health, and prevent the spread of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. The team's findings are published in a paper entitled Microfluidic cantilever detects bacteria and measures their susceptibility to antibiotics in small confined volumes in the current issue of Nature Communications...
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New Film ‘SWINE' Exposes the Secret Life of Factory Farms and the Rise in Antibiotic Resistance in Farmed Animals
Today (Friday, 8th July) the charity Viva! will debut its new short thriller/documentary, film SWINE which exposes the dirty secrets of factory farming in UK - including the growing health risks to humans from MRSA Superbugs. This short but alarming film exposes the impending crisis of antibiotic resistance developing in UK factory farms and more broadly highlights the failings of the industrialised meat industry...
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New Salmonella Outbreak In Chicken Resists Antibiotics
A salmonella outbreak linked to raw chicken from California involves several antibiotic-resistant strains of the disease and has put at least 42% of the victims in the hospital, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. Read More »
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New Study Is an Advance Toward Preventing a ‘Post-Antibiotic Era’
UCLA’s Elif Tekin, Casey Beppler, Pamela Yeh and Van Savage are gaining insights into why certain groups of three antibiotics interact well together and others don’t. A landmark report by the World Health Organization in 2014 observed that antibiotic resistance — long thought to be a health threat of the future — had finally become a serious threat to public health around the world. A top WHO official called for an immediate and aggressive response to prevent what he called a “post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill”...- Login to post comments
No One Knows How Many Patients Are Dying from Superbug Infections in California Hospitals
Many thousands of Californians are dying every year from infections they caught while in hospitals. But you’d never know that from their death certificates. Sharley McMullen of Manhattan Beach came down with a fever just hours after being wheeled out of a Torrance Memorial Medical Center operating room on May 4, 2014. A missionary’s daughter who worked as a secretary at Cape Canaveral, Fla., at the height of the space race, McMullen, 72, was there for treatment of a bleeding stomach ulcer. Soon, though, she was fighting for her life...
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One Hour Flu Test Developed by Scientists in Move That Could Tackle Antibiotic Resistance
Scientists have developed a test which can diagnose flu in one hour, in a move which could speed up access to the right treatment and tackle antibiotic resistance. The instant swab tests, invented at University Hospital Southampton Foundation trust, mean specific viruses can be isolated, and given the right treatment, within 60 minutes. Currently such processses take almost a week, meaning thousands of patients are needlessly given antibiotics, fuelling spiralling drug resistance...
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Online-only Pharmacies That Don't Require Prescriptions Could Fuel Antibiotic Resistance
The researchers from Imperial College London analysed 20 pharmacies that were available for UK citizens to access online. This is one of the few studies to have examined the online availability of antibiotics and to have explored the potential effects on public health. The research is published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are classed as prescription only medicines in the UK, meaning they cannot legally be sold to consumers without a valid prescription...
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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
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Peer into the Post-Apocalyptic Future of Antimicrobial Resistance
Aout 4 million years ago, a cave was forming in the Delaware Basin of what is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. From that time on, Lechuguilla Cave remained untouched by humans or animals until its discovery in 1986—an isolated, pristine primeval ecosystem. When the bacteria found on the walls of Lechuguilla were analyzed, many of the microbes were determined not only to have resistance to natural antibiotics like penicillin, but also to synthetic antibiotics that did not exist on earth until the second half of the twentieth century...
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Phage Therapy Shown to Kill Drug-Resistant Superbug
Scientists from the University of Liverpool have shown that phage therapy could offer a safe and effective alternative to antibiotics in the treatment of Cystic Fibrosis lung infections. Chronic lung infections caused by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa are becoming increasingly difficult to treat due to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). With limited alternative therapeutic options available this has led to a renewed interest in (bacterio)phage therapy. Phages are viruses that kill bacteria but are otherwise harmless. A major advantage is that phages only target the harmful bacteria, so there are less side of the effects often associated with antibiotics...
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PolyU Discovers a Newly Emerged Superbug -- Hyper-Resistant and Hypervirulent Klebsiella Pneumoniae
The Partner State Key Laboratory of Chirosciences at the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology (ABCT) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) discovered a newly emerged superbug, hyper-resistant and hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae, which may cause untreatable and fatal infections in relatively healthy individuals and will pose enormous threat to human health...
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Predicting Antibiotic Resistance
Treating bacterial infections with antibiotics is becoming increasingly difficult as bacteria develop resistance not only to the antibiotics being used against them, but also to ones they have never encountered before. By analyzing genetic and phenotypic changes in antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli, researchers at the RIKEN Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC) in Japan have revealed a common set of features that appear to be responsible for the development of resistance to several types of antibiotics...
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